Toronto

ACORN Canada organizers who had spent time in the general assembly process at Occupy Ottawa, Occupy Toronto, and Occupy Vancouver shared similarly maddening and difficult experiences with the painstaking and time consuming consensus decision making process.  Clearly each place is a little different and here in Canada we are several steps removed from Wall Street, which has set the model for this process, but the basic elements seem standard and replicable.  The solidarity system of repeating what is being said to neighbors without a sound system has been picked up and repeated.  The elaborate systems of hand signals indicating agreement, disagreement, withholding consensus, and so forth has also spread throughout North America and likely the globe.  In fact the Canadian newspaper, the National Post ran a story indicating that there are now Occupy locations in 154 countries and based on monitoring Twitter traffic they believed that Canada was now the second most active Occupy movement after the United States itself.

I had a long chat with one of our young Ottawa ACORN organizers, Alex MacDonnell, who had spent quite a bit of time with Occupy Ottawa including participation in general assembly meetings and several committee meetings.  His argument to me was both fascinating and important, and we’ll see over time if it is also true.  As time consuming and difficult as the process was, he believed that the one thing that might survive in our work from the Occupy movement might be the assembly process.

Andy Kroll writing in Mother Jones makes the same case in a piece about the origins and organizers of the Occupy movement (http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/10/occupy-wall-street-international-origins).  Like all movements, no one can take credit for a movement, but whether on Wall Street or in Tahrir Square there are always “organizers” and others who kept pushing forward until something happen.

The assembly decision making structure seems to come directly from spring protests in Spain and one can read a widely translated and fascinating “manual” of sorts on “How to Cook a Pacific Revolution” on the www.takethesquare.net site, which Kroll referenced as well.  A thumbnail of the process was included in the highlights of their manifesto of sorts:

“We’re organizing around assemblies, reaching decisions openly, democratically and horizontally. We have no leaders or hierarchy.
Since there’s plenty of work, all sorts of work, to be done, we’ve organized the task at hand around three types of bodies: commissions, working groups and general assemblies.

The commissions and working groups operate independently. The commissions are structural and organizational and serve as tools for the movement (the Legal and IT Commissions are two examples). The working groups are platforms for collective thought, debate and research on specific subjects (we have working groups on subjects such as politics, the economy and the environment, for instance).

These commissions and working groups are open to anyone who wants to participate. They hold their meetings in public spaces, announced in advance, and all their decisions are recorded in minutes that are published on line. They all organize around horizontal assemblies, but each group collectively establishes it own modus operandi, which is permanently open to change and optimization.

All-important decisions made by these commissions and working groups are subsequently raised to the General Assembly for assessment and ratification by the movement as a whole. Hence, while our work gets done efficiently and independently, it is coordinated horizontally by our assemblies.”

The assemblies are run not by “leaders” or “organizers” but by facilitators.  I’m betting that a lot of their “training” is based on the translation from the Spanish of the “Quick Guide on Group Dynamics in Peoples’ Assemblies” (Quick guide on group dynamics in people’s assemblies). For all of the handwringing and make believe of the Tea-people, my friend Glenn Beck, and others, there is an important and fascinating infrastructure underneath this movement which is absolutely worth organizers studying thoroughly and coming to understand.

Here are some starting points, so let’s see how far we all get as we wrap our minds around this process and this emerging movement and its methodology.

Hustling across the city in the rain to George Brown College, it turned out we were only a spit away from Occupy Tornoto, which was standing straight and strong – and colorful with scores of tents – in a park on Queen Street almost next door to the college.  John Anderson, our western Canada colleague, told us in no uncertain terms that Occupy Vancouver was without a doubt the largest in the country, but Occupy Toronto was no slouch.  Unfortunately, we could see a half-dozen burly bicycle cops at the edge of the tents holding a guy down in the rain.  It seemed random, but Judy Duncan and I could easily see that the police were more the downer than the rain this afternoon.

George Brown College and its community service placement program is simply the best in the world and their support for ACORN International has been unparalleled.  Professor Bill Fallis, Pramila Aggarwal, and other old friends came by and 20 students showed up on their own to hear Judy talk about her experience in Nairobi organizing in Korogocho with ACORN Kenya last spring and me talk about progress on our Remittance Justice Campaign which GBC interns helped research extensively on the first report.  As always, I learned as much as I offered from the diverse student body.  The hawala system was made categorically illegal after 9/11 in Afghanistan according to a student from there.  Prior to 9/11 remittances from his family to the country cost 3% using hawala.  Those days are over (see the hawala report on www.acorninternatinal.org).  A similar story was told by other students on charges to the Ukraine and Uganda.  In each case I couldn’t help enlisting the students to help us compile the best information on the rates between these countries and Canada to continue to help us document these predatory transfers in the remittance channels between so many countries.  The sun my not have been shining on a bleak fall day in Toronto, but I was seeing real interest in more GBC students joining the ACORN Intern Army, so we were radiating smiles on our face as we hit the streets in early evening.

New Orleans

Speaking of calls, flipping the channels before passing out last night, I saw the Media Matters guy talking head with an interviewer.  He first caught my ears with a phrase about the “innocent staffers at the Tides Foundation” being “targeted for assassination,” and knowing so many of them, I could easily visualize them reaching for their cell phones to call Mom back home and explain why this was really a good job! He was threatening to call Sarah Palin, if she didn’t respond to their request for her to denounce Glenn Beck and all of the right wing hate speech.  Yeah, right!  Grizzly mom sets the scene for slaughter in speech after speech.  This call won’t be answered, unfortunately.

Julian Assange of Wikileaks likes to speak for his program but he’s not getting much Media 101 advice from his volunteer team, and this may be why his German spokesperson got in a huff and resigned.  He seems to have somehow believed that he could walk off the set on news interviews when he doesn’t like the questions and did so on the other day on CNN.  Even with Mr. Softball Larry King and Daniel Ellsberg they had a minute where they thought he had buzzed off.  He seems to be offended that folks are going to ask him about the rape and molestation accusations in Sweden.  Well, hello, Julian?  Until it’s resolved, of course they’re going to ask, and you just answer, and then move on, don’t be an ass about it and think somehow that this is something diva antics can handle.  Come on, this is bush league.  Man up!

On the rabid right because an election is nigh upon us, there’s a spate of ACORN’s BACK articles on the whack-and-blog front proving once again that the right is now so atavistic that it has become necromantic.   Please friends and neighbors, keep away from cemeteries until after November 2^nd.  ACORN is dead as a doornail and no amount of blowhard air is going to resuscitate it.  I got a couple of emails yesterday and forwarded links where someone was trying to conflate poor Project Vote’s meager efforts this round and argue Project Vote and ACORN were one and the same so let’s go to town.  I wouldn’t want to confuse anyone with the facts, but Project Vote is simply not the same as ACORN.  The facts are simple.  If ACORN were still alive and well, there would be a different calculus right now on the eve of the mid-term elections.  The outcome might not be that much different, but the contest would be closer and fairer if lower income and working people were registered and going out to vote in the numbers we have seen in the past.

Which also makes me think about Toronto, one of the shining progressive city lights of North America and has me head scratching to figure out the Mayor’s election this week?  How is it possible that a hard right conservative could win by over a 100,000 votes?   There’s no job in Mudville today.

So off to Phoenix!

Hamilton

Let me share just one piece of the richness of the exchange initiated by a caution and comment by one participant, Jesse Hirsh, when we wandered into the area of whether or not new social networking tools like Facebook and Twitter might play a role in popular education for members and leadership development in mass-based organizations.  Hirsh had seen a poster for the discussion and popped in to see what it was all about, but after introducing himself as someone who worried and thought about these issues, as many of us do, indicated his skepticism about the tools.  He started making his point by noting how difficult it had been for organizations and activists to get access to the modern flashpoints of concentration like malls.  We laughed at the times we had all tried, been turned away, arrested, and what not.  He then observed sharply that “Twitter is a mall!”

Without explaining he had made his point.  Twitter is a huge mass of blurbs and belches of words and information streamed along a vast aisle where we walk and run or turn away in dismay unable to figure out whether to go in and shop or keep walking and gawking.  Learning to use such a tool to actually organize poses challenges and even more so figuring out a way to jump into the torrent and vastness of this mall-like world is something that none of us have grasped successfully.

Worse, we have not even really figured out how to make it a two-way or multiple communication tool.  Comments on Facebook at least are a sign of life in the universe.  The twitter-verse is still mainly small shouts without much recognition of what is being heard much less how to move forward and participate.

Note to self:  much work to be done!

The Tamil community in Toronto is reportedly the second largest in the world after Chennai and southern India itself. The community has mobilized recently in a desperate life-and-death struggle to try to leverage its size in Toronto to force the Canadian government not to allow the Sri Lankan army to inflict genocide on the Tamil civilians caught in the crossfire in this country as the government bears down in its drive to wipe out the last vestiges of the long civil war in that country fought with the so-called Tamil Tigers. The United Nations

reported over the last 24 hours that somewhere between 378 and 1000 civilians were killed in this squeeze in recent days in a combination of the government attack and the guerilla utilization of civilians as human shields.

The Toronto Tamil community with relatives throughout the war zone has been engaged in one mobilization after another in an attempt to force the issue to the front of the pile for the conservative Canadian federal government. Most dramatically on Sunday after a long protest featuring yet more street blocking (which for decades has been one of my favorite and most effective tactics in countless campaigns), protestors left the area around Union Station’s train hub and block the expressway going through downtown Toronto hear the Rogers Centre where the Blue Jays play. They were immediately set upon by all manner of police and SWAT teams in a standoff that blocked the expressway for hours. [James Wardlaw, head organizer of ACORN Canada in Hamilton, brought all of this to my attention since he was caught on a bus and stranded for hours trying to get from Newmarket back down to Hamilton.]

In the Canadian multi-party system, the Tamil tactics have garnered support from the Liberal Party (which is not that liberal) that is pushing the governing party hard, and trying to cement its immigrant base in Ontario. The government has not formally moved to intervene.

News seems suppressed and spotty on these major actions around another war that is halfway around the globe, but all of this is worth careful watching not only because it is important and lives are at stake, but also because the Toronto Tamil community may be teaching all of us a master course in effective global organizing utilizing the local leverage you have available.